Missing From the Juan Williams Debate: "The ACORN Deal"

A raging debate has ensued around whether National Public Radio (NPR) correctly fired Juan Williams. Some say Williams undermined his credibility as a news analyst. Others accuse NPR of bungling its response and stifling free speech. What's been missing in the debate over his firing is this:

Immediately after NPR fired Williams because of his remarks about Muslims, Fox cable's Bill O'Reilly said, "This is like the ACORN deal - no more money to NPR. NPR has now devolved into a totalitarian outfit functioning as an arm of the far left."

The Republican leadership and the right-wing echo chamber followed O'Reilly's call for the federal defunding of NPR. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) announced plans to introduce legislation to strip federal funds from NPR because it fired Williams. According to DeMint, NPR received $4 billion in federal money since 2001 and will get $430 million in the 2011. Republican Minority Whip Eric Cantor and nearly every Republican running for office this year promised to seek an end to taxpayer subsidies for NPR and public television.

ACORN, the anti-poverty community group, destroyed by the Republican Party and its communications department, Fox News, has become today's symbol for the collective punishment for groups the conservatives considers America's evil wrong doers.

Republicans demonized ACORN, and see NPR as a political threat: ACORN because of its effective grassroots organizing and voter registration, NPR because of its even-handed coverage of politics, which sometimes challenges conservative orthodoxy.

The principle behind "The ACORN deal" is if an individual from a group (ACORN or NPR) makes a mistake, and the group does not adhere to a conservative philosophy of unfettered free markets and Christian fundamentalism, then the entire organization must be punished. In 2009, the US Congress defunded ACORN, after a barrage of false accusations led to its destruction. ACORN, whose members are mostly African-American, which, for four decades, was America's most effective anti-poverty group, should never have been destroyed.

Moreover, the Republican's call for defunding ACORN and NPR is hypocritical since the GOP and Fox News don't apply the same standards to the misdeeds and even crimes committed by businesses or groups that conforms to free-market and Christian fundamentalism, and enjoy government support.

For nearly 40 years, ACORN, had been mobilizing low-income Americans to fight for social justice, challenging powerful banks, corporations and government officials around such issues as wages for the working poor, predatory lending and foreclosures, welfare reform, public education, affordable housing and voting rights. And then, suddenly, in less than two years after its former ally Barack Obama got elected, in one of the most bizarre incidents in recent political history, it was destroyed by a ferocious attack by the right wing of the Republican Party, its allies, and Fox News.

Although it was exonerated of all charges of wrong doing by six independent investigations including two Congressional investigations, the Brooklyn DA and the California attorney general, ACORN had to dissolve because its name had been defamed.

Ironically, it was NPR along with The New York Times and other mainstream media that helped destroy ACORN by repeating the voter registration fraud and other accusations against the group, failing to give adequate coverage of ACORN's 40 years of good work, and by virtually ignoring the investigations that exonerated the group of any wrong doing. According to a study by Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin, during October 2008, a time when very few people ever heard of ACORN, 72.2 percent of NPR's stories had the voter fraud frame, while most of the stories gave at best a cursory background of ACORN's work of empowering the working poor.

For example, just two weeks before the Senate action, on September 2, drug company giant Pfizer had been hit with the biggest criminal fine in US history as part of a $2.3 billion settlement with federal prosecutors for illegally promoting medicines and for paying kickbacks to doctors. The company was paying $1 billion in civil settlements for Medicare and Medicaid fraud. According to fedspending.org, in 2007, Pfizer had more than $73 million in federal contracts. Blackwater, a company that had five of its employees facing murder charges in a massacre of Iraqi civilians in 2007, had received a $217 million contract to provide security in Iraq. A former Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, had received $80 million in contract bonuses to provide electrical wiring in Iraq, which electrocuted 16 soldiers and two contractors. Northrop Grumman had to pay a $500 million fine for getting caught nine times committing contract fraud. The Congress that defunded ACORN had also bailed out Goldman Sachs, AIG, J. P. Morgan, and other financial services corporations that lacked transparency, committed unethical or illegal acts and engaged in practices that led to the crash of our financial system. The political attacks on ACORN revealed an obvious double standard. How else to explain why Republicans and the right insisted on defunding ACORN for its errors, but failed to seek the same treatment for chronic corporate lawbreakers that receive billions in federal dollars?

The hypocrisy was striking.

So, here's the ACORN rule: no collective punishment for the rich and powerful, ideologically correct conservatives. For them, the punishment is tailored to fit the crime. They pay a fine, plead guilty to a misdemeanor or other minor offense and go on to reap millions in federal funds. For the groups who are part of the "ACORN deal" - that is, the politically incorrect - we must defund and destroy them.